Saturday, February 18, 2017

So Iowa has embraced a horrific Race To The Bottom, considering and too often adopting wildly regressive policies statewide. One of the latest is House File 7, introduced by a particularly benighted member of the State House, which would effectively extend vaccination exemptions to anyone who just doesn't really feel like participating.

I took exception to this and, as is my custom, made my opinion known.

The QC Times published my letter today; please check it out. Text below, for archival purposes.

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This letter is in regard to House File 7, the bill that would broaden vaccination exemptions in Iowa.

This is not a personal freedom issue, this is a public health crisis. Just as we no longer allow our streets to serve as open sewers, nor our ER waiting rooms to be cigar lounges, we should not open the door to vaccination exemptions that will only lead to the resurgence of easily preventable diseases. A population of vaccinated, healthy adults provides “community immunity,” keeping the most vulnerable members of our society - infants, cancer patients, transplant recipients - from catching potentially fatal infections.

In attempting to advance the noble cause of personal freedom, this bill’s authors seem to have missed the point that that your personal freedom stops at my, or my child’s, body.

It is ironic that the only reason that this bill is even under consideration is that vaccines have been tremendously effective at pushing the horrific epidemics of the past into fading memory. Listen to the pediatricians. Vaccination is both the moral and the rational choice.

"There is grandeur in this view of life... that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."-Charles Darwin, 1859